ARTIST'S STATEMENT

Touch, a seemingly intuitive and physical act, is anything but; and especially as (queer-femme) bodies with breaths, we know that touch is a ripple, a wrinkle, a ruffle, a network: it happens and leads us through our pleasures, desires, memories, forgotten traumas, current anxieties, possibilities – alone or together or abandoned – and it happens and it carries us along. This work ‘Does your amma wash your mango with baking soda?’ is a personal attempt at translating the moment in my quarantine when a single “touch”, not physical, affected me in multiple languages some of which I do not have the grammar for. The project aims to visualize networks, haptics, intimacies, and worldly aches in this pandemic through a Google Earth tour of the route to my house in Nagpur, screenshots of personal messages, an Instagram poll, and other residues from my regular. Eventually I ask, and hopefully you do too: all because someone somewhere touched that mango?

 

 

BIOGRAPHY

I have a tattoo with a typo.  Also, I’m an interdisciplinary researcher, dipping my brain in all things gooey, finicky, cracked and silent. I enjoy working with photography as a medium, and in the past have engaged with queer ecology, materialism and sociology of spaces through a project ‘leftover pleasures’ that questions fictional and non-fictional memories of pleasures in queer bodies. In the everyday, I am mostly moved by illustrations in children’s books, poetry written out of ache, and the smell of freshly cooked white rice.